Golden Earth (14 page)

We passed through several small towns. They had no particular character and consisted of no more than a street and a square where the markets would be held. As we were deep in the Shan country, there were no more pagodas, but shrines had been erected on the town’s outskirts to the tutelary spirits, and some of them were hung with votive offerings of puppet-horses. Among the jumble of Burmese and Chinese lettering on the shop fronts, a single notice in English jumped out, ‘Pickle sold here’. At Kyaukme we stopped to unload a cargo of small green tomatoes. Here there was to be an hour’s wait, and the chief passenger took charge of my
movements and told me that he would show me round the town. He now introduced himself as Tin Maung. As he was then delayed by being called in to consult on more engine trouble, I wandered over to a teahouse. In this tea-growing country, plain tea is considered unbearably dull. It is served with a sediment of some kind of cereal, and many of the Shans, unsatisfied with this consistency, poured it into their saucers and proceeded to make up a kind of minestrone by mixing it with the contents of a small dough pie, for which the teahouse charged four annas.

After a few minutes Tin Maung made a dignified appearance to take tea. There was the usual preliminary silence, then he asked, ‘Are you carrying a weapon with you?’ I said no, and Tin Maung said ‘That is a good thing. Before the war we used to carry guns for tigers. But now it is not a good thing to carry guns any more. If we carry guns we shoot.’ I nodded understandingly. The market here was exceptionally lively. Some of the local tribespeople wore patchwork cloaks in bright colours, with Moroccan-looking hoods. I asked Tin Maung if he thought I could photograph them and he went over, and, to my mind, with undue formality, called for the head of the family. There was a long discussion, followed by a refusal. Since all Tin Maung’s utterances were preceded by the intervals of silence occupied by the marshalling and translation of his thoughts, I shall cease to mention these pauses. On this occasion he said, ‘They do not refuse from shyness, but from superstition.’ Later when I thought the incident had been forgotten, he said, ‘Our minds have to be adjusted to the medieval conditions, which are variable.’

Here in Kyaukme there was a legless leper, who propelled himself along on his haunches, with pads fitted to his hands. He was assisted most tenderly in his passage round the market by a small boy, whose arm was round his neck. From experience gained in Mandalay, I judged that the boy was in the first stages of leprosy.

Through the brazen hours that followed high noon, we crept onwards through a tunnel of glittering verdure. Then in the early afternoon came the official stop for breakfast. We were in a tiny hamlet, a few branch-and-leaf
huts round a well. A single half-blind pariah dog slunk up to inspect us and was immediately chased away by a pair of lean, hairy swine that came rushing out of one of the huts. A cavern had been hollowed out of the wall of rock that formed the background to the village, and wisps of smoke trailed up through a sort of bamboo veranda that had been built over the mouth of it. This infernal place was the restaurant.

The moment had now come when all European prejudices about food had to be abandoned; all fears of typhoid or dysentery had to be banished resolutely from the mind. Even if I held back now and refused to enter this murky grotto, there was a long succession of others awaiting me, and ultimately sheer hunger would settle the matter. Remote journeyings had their advantages, the occasional sense of adventure, the novelties of experience. They also had their drawbacks, and this was one of them. And as there was no turning back from them, it was just as well to be bold.

In the dim interior – a model of most remote oriental eating-houses – we were awaited by a cook who was naked to the waist. Tattooed dragons writhed among the cabalistic figures on his chest and arms. A snippet of intestine was clinging to a finger, which, shaken off, was caught in midair by an attendant cat. Tin Maung gave an order and in due course the head-waiter arrived, a rollicking Shan with shining bald head and Manchu moustaches, carrying a dish heaped with scrawny chickens’ limbs, jaundiced with curry, a bowl of rice and a couple of aluminium plates. When uncertain how to behave, watch what the others do. A few minutes later I was neatly stripping the tendons from those saffron bones; kneading the rice into a form in which it could be carried in the fingers to the mouth. But the
spécialité de la maison
was undoubtedly pickled cabbage, with garlic and chili-pepper. This Shan delicacy was gravely recommended by Tin Maung as ‘full of vitamins’. It had a sharp, sour flavour, for which a taste was easily acquired; I should certainly have missed this and many other similar experiences had I been able to follow the advice given in the
Burma Handbook:
‘… there are no hotels, and the traveller, when he quits the line of railway or Irawadi steamer, must get leave from the Deputy Commissioner of the district to put up at
Government bungalows, and must take bedding, a cook and a few cooking utensils.’

Although Tin Maung had said that it was most unlikely that we should reach Lashio in one day, we found ourselves by the late afternoon within a few miles of the town. We had just crossed the Nam Mi river, where I had admired the spectacle of landslides of the brightest red earth plunging down the hillside into deep, green water, when we were stopped by a posse of soldiers. They told us that Chinese Nationalist bandits had temporarily cut the road, only four kilometres from Lashio, and had shot-up and looted the truck in front of ours. As this had happened several hours before, it was not exactly a narrow escape. But there was a delay until an officer of the Shan police arrived to tell us we could carry on. As we came into the outskirts of Lashio, the sun set. Flocks of mynas and parakeets had appeared in the treetops, where they went through the noisy, twilight manoeuvres of starlings in a London square.

In accordance with the recommendations already quoted from the
Burma Handbook
, I asked the driver of the lorry to put me down at the Dak Bungalow, but there appeared to be some difficulty, and Tin Maung told me that it had been taken over by the army. He invited me to come to his house, where I could leave my luggage while making further enquiries. Lashio had been partly destroyed by bombing but, it seemed, rebuilt along the lines of the English hill-station it had once been, with detached bungalows, each with its own garden. We stopped at one of these. It was now nearly dark, and a young man clad only in shorts came running down the path, and opened the gate. Approaching us, he crossed his arms and bowed in a rather Japanese fashion, only partially
straightening
himself when he turned away. Tin Maung nodded towards the baggage, and uttered a word, and the still stooping figure snatched up both suitcases and hurried away to the house with them. He was not, as I imagined at the time, a servant, but a younger brother.

I was then invited to go and sit on the balcony of the house, where I
was met by Tin Maung’s father. U Thein Zan looked like a lean Burmese version of one of those rollicking Chinese gods of good fortune. Even when his mouth was relaxed his eyes were creased-up as if in a spasm of mirth. He had learned, in fact, as I soon discovered, to express his emotions in terms of smiles: a gay smile (the most frequent), a tolerant smile (for the shortcomings of others), a roguish smile (when his own weaknesses were under discussion), a rueful smile (for his sharp losses, the state of Burma and humanity in general).

In the background hovered the mother. In her case no formal presentation was made. The three of us, father, son and myself, sat there on the balcony making occasional disjointed remarks about the political situation. From time to time the younger brother came out of the house, bowed and went in. The mother appeared, curled herself up in a chair well removed from the important conclave of males, and lit up a cheroot. There was no sign of stir or excitement. Later I learned that this was the return of the eldest son after an absence of two years, during which time the brother next in age to him had been killed by insurgents. I could have imagined Chinese etiquette imposing these rigid standards of self-control, but it came as a great surprise that
old-fashioned
Burmese families should follow such a rule of conduct.

The matter of finding somewhere to sleep now came up, and the younger son was sent off to make enquiries about a bungalow belonging to the Public Works Department. He was soon back to say that it was full of soldiers, although there might be a room free next night. Upon this Tin Maung said that I would have to sleep in his father’s house, and signalled for my baggage to be taken inside. I apologised to the old man for the trouble I was putting him to, whereupon he handsomely said, ‘Anyone my son brings home becomes my son,’ accompanying this speech with such a truly genial smile that it was impossible to feel any longer ill at ease.

But before there could be any question of retiring for the night, U Thein Zan said, there were formalities to be attended to. He thought that owing to the unsettled local conditions I ought to be on the safe side by reporting, without delay, to the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and after dressing himself carefully, he took up a lantern and accompanied
me to the functionary’s house. The DSP soon mastered his surprise at the visit, seemed relieved that I was under the control of such a pillar of local society as U Thein Zan, and found me several forms to fill in. In the morning, he said, I must report to the office of the Special Commissioner for the region, and to the commanding officer of the garrison. The latter obligation was one of which nothing had been said in Rangoon, and I decided to avoid it if possible. With Chinese bandits in the vicinity I could imagine this officer considering himself justified in putting me under some kind of restrictive military protection, or even sending me under escort back to Mandalay. When I brought up the matter of the attack on the truck, the DSP firmly announced that it had been the work of local Shans.

We went back home and sat for a while chatting desultorily and listening to the radio. Two stations were coming in fairly well: La Voix d’Islam broadcast on a beam from Radio Toulouse, and a station which might have been Peking, because the announcements were in Chinese, and the music Western and evangelical in flavour, with the exception of one playing of a marching song of the Red Army. U Thein Zan was a fervent Buddhist and liked to talk about his religion whenever he could. He was delighted because next day a famous abbot would be preaching several sermons at the local monastery and he was to play a prominent part in the welcoming ceremony.

Soon after this the family retired to bed. The house was a rather flimsy construction raised on piles about three feet from the ground. It
consisted
of two main rooms and a kitchen, had a palm-thatched roof and a floor of split bamboo. I was left to myself in one of the rooms, while the five members of the family – another brother had just turned up – were to sleep in the other. Clearly the old mother did not approve of this arrangement, which I gathered, from her gestures, probably went against her ideas on true hospitality. Perhaps she felt that I was not being treated as a member of the family. At all events she protested and was with difficulty overruled by Tin Maung, who probably told her that
communal
sleeping was not a European custom; and with a shrug of bewildered resignation she let the thing go as it was. Bars were put over the door and
a shutter fitted to the window. The younger brother appeared carrying a camp bed which he erected in a corner. By the side of this Tin Maung set a stool with a lamp, a glass of water, a saucer of nuts and several giant cheroots. Before going into the other room he told me not to put the lamp out. I wondered why.

Taking off my clothes, I put on a cotton longyi which I had bought in Mandalay. It had been recommended as the coolest thing to sleep in. Turning the lamp low, I lay down on the camp bed, and was just dozing off when I heard a slight creaking, and through half-opened eyes saw Tin Maung, going slowly round the room, flashing an electric torch on the walls and ceiling. I asked him what he was looking for, and he said, ‘Sometimes there are moths.’ He then tiptoed quickly from the room. My eyelids came together and then opened, reluctantly, at a faint scuffling sound. The bungalow consisted of a framework of timber upon which sheets of some white-washed material had been nailed. It was like a very ramshackle example of a small black-and-white Essex cottage. On one wall, just above my feet was a Buddha shrine, containing a rather unusual reclining Buddha and offerings of dried flowers in vases. From behind this there now appeared several rats, not large, but lively, which began to move in a series of hesitant rushes along the beam running round the room. There were soon seven of them in sight.

I watched this movement with dazed curiosity for a time, and then began to doze again. Then, suddenly, an extraordinary protective faculty came into use. Once during the recent war, I had noticed that whilst my sleep was not disturbed by our own howitzers firing in the same field, I was inevitably awakened when the dawn stillness was troubled by the thin whistle of enemy shells, passing high overhead. Now, on the verge of unconsciousness, I felt in the skull, rather than heard, a faint scratching of tiny scrambling limbs. Something, I half-dreamed and half-thought, was climbing up the leg of the camp bed. Turning my head I caught a brief, out-of-focus glimpse of a small black body on the pillow by my cheek. Then in a scamper it was gone. It was a scorpion, I thought, or a hairy spider of the tarantula kind. I linked its appearance with Tin Maung’s mysterious inspection of the room with his torch. What was to be done?
I got up, thinking that whatever this animal was, it would come back to achieve its purpose as soon as I fell asleep. I thought of sitting in the chair and staying awake for the rest of the night, but when I picked up the lamp to turn up the wick, it felt light, and shaking it produced only a faint splashing of oil in the bottom of the container. In a short time then, the lamp would go out, and my scorpion or whatever it was, with others of its kind, would come boldly up through the interstices in the bamboo floor. The next impulse was to spend the night walking round Lashio, and I went to unfasten the door bar. Immediately the pariah dog that lived under the house, where it lay all night snuffling and whining, burst into snarling life, furiously echoed by all the dogs in the district. I thought of the trigger-happy police of Lashio, who would have Chinese bandits on their mind.